boys and girls. Albert and Ralph found themselves, with four smaller
Hoyers, in an enormous low-ceiled room with many windows. In three
corners stood huge canopied bedsteads, with flowered-chintz curtains and
mountainous eiderdown coverings which swelled up toward the ceiling. In
the middle of the wall, opposite the windows, a big iron stove, like
the one in the sitting-room (only that it was adorned with a bunch of
flowers, peaches, and grapes, and not with Diana and her nymphs), was
roaring merrily, and sending a long red sheen from its draught-hole
across the floor.

Around the big warm stove the boys gathered (for it was positively
Siberian in the region of the windows), and while undressing played
various pranks upon each other, which created much merriment. But
the most laughter was provoked at the expense of Finn Hoyer, a boy of
fourteen, whose bare back his brother insisted upon exhibiting to his
guest; for it was decorated with a facsimile of the picture on the
stove, showing roses and luscious peaches and grapes in red relief.
Three years before, on Christmas Eve, the boys had stood about the
red-hot stove, undressing for their bath, and Finn, who was naked, had,
in the general scrimmage to get first into the bath-tub, been
pushed against the glowing iron, the ornamentation of which had been
beautifully burned upon his back. He had to be wrapped in oil and cotton
after that adventure, and he recovered in due time, but never quite
relished the distinction he had acquired by his pictorial skin.

It was long before Albert fell asleep; for the cold kept up a continual
fusillade, as of musketry, during the entire night. The woodwork of the
walls snapped and cracked with loud reports; and a little after midnight
a servant came in and stuffed the stove full of birch-wood, until it
roared like an angry lion. This roar finally lulled Albert to sleep, in
spite of the startling noises about him.

The next morning the boys were aroused at seven o'clock by a servant,
who brought a tray with the most fragrant coffee and hot rolls. It was
in honor of the guest that, in accordance with Norse custom, this
early meal was served; and all the boys, carrying pillows and blankets,
gathered on Albert's and Ralph's bed and feasted right royally. So it
seemed to them, at least; for any break in the ordinary routine, be it
ever so slight, is an event to the young. Then they had a pillow-fight,
thawed at the stove the water in the p